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Hail
Caesar’s
In an industry notorious for its failure rate, Caesar’s Steak
House has stood the test of time — 40 years, if you’re counting
by Shelley Arnusch photography by Jared Sych
From left to right
George Kaketsis,
Nick Kaketsis,
Con Giannoulis and
Gerry Stuart.
here’s an
archetypal
restaurant that
grandad dreams
about when he
dozes off in front
of the TV with his
glasses on his chest.
It’s clad in dark panels and upholstered in
red leather. The martinis
are clear, the serving
staff are mature and the
smell of expertly
charred beef hangs
so thick in the air,
you can still smell
it on your clothes
three days after
you’ve pushed your chair back from the table,
retrieved your coat from the girl manning the
automated rack and sauntered out into the night,
sucking on a chalky mint and mindlessly tonguing a toothpick.
It’s the kind of place that has played host to
countless sportsmen and the odd celebrity or
two; the kind of place where moustaches are
sported without a trace of irony or charitable
largesse. The kind of place that stays the same
the more things change.
If grandad lives in, has ever lived in or has
visited Calgary on a regular basis, there’s a good
chance that place is Caesar’s Steak House.
When you consider how much Calgary’s
downtown has changed in the last decade,
just imagine what things were like back in the
late 1960s. A couple of conspicuous high-rises
poked their heads above a general mish-mash of
squat buildings like curious prairie dogs. There
was no Olympic Plaza. No shiny blue Municipal
Building or chic shopping Core, and the paint
was still drying on the Calgary Tower. Pockmarked with empty lots and lined to the north
by a row of derelict single-family homes, 4th
Avenue S.W. was not what you’d call an inviting
stroll. The strip featured a motel and a vacant
two-storey building that had once housed a
print shop.
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But something about that print shop caught
the eye of a foursome of young Greek immigrants, small restaurant owners all, who were
ready to hang up their shingle on something
splashy. While it likely didn’t look like the real
estate deal of the century, Nick Kaketsis, Con
Giannoulis, Louie Tsaprailis and Louie Girgulis
purchased the property. It would turn out to be a
prescient decision — considering the restaurant
industry’s notorious failure rate, being your own
landlord is certainly one way to tilt the odds in
your favour. They converted it into a 180-seat
dining room and 70-seat lounge and named it Julius Caesar’s Steak House (Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas being
the acknowledged inspiration).
Kaketsis took over the dining
room, Tsaprailis took the reins in
to the
the lounge and Giannoulis held
gills with oilmen and bankers, closing deals
court over the kitchen.
On the night of Wednesday,
over garrulous martini lunches.
April 26, 1972, they fired up the
broiler and opened the doors.
good food and good service and we’ll survive,”’
“They were calling us ‘the second Petroleum
Even if you own your own building, however,
Giannoulis says.
Club’ because it was all men in the lounge in
you won’t get anywhere in the restaurant business if you don’t give customers what they want. those days,” says Giannoulis. “There was a lot of
The owners stayed their hand, determined to,
deals made in the lounge in those days.” Today’s
Caesar’s, as it would come to be known, figured
if it came to it, burn out classy rather than fade
oilmen still head to Caesar’s to celebrate, though
out what the people in this town wanted pretty
away. It was a decision that would see Caesar’s
the former leniency about drinking and driving
much right off the bat: steak. Beautiful, blushlive to see the barometer rise again, enough to
is no longer appreciated.
ing, beefy slabs, seared over a flaming broiler.
warrant adding a second location, in Willow
Still, the saying still goes around these parts
Just in case there was any doubt in anyone’s
Park, in 1985.
that if you want a barometer on how the oil
mind that the steak was to be the star here, the
Caesar’s took a similarly principled stance
patch is doing, stop by Caesar’s at lunch. There’s
broiler was put on display in a glass-walled
when, in 2003, its culinary raison d’être —
something inherently celebratory about a steak
enclosure that jutted out into the main dining
Alberta beef — came under fire due to an
room, the main event in a nightly floor show that dinner, or, as Kaketsis’s son, George, puts it:
outbreak of mad cow disease in the province.
“When you close a deal, no one ever suggests
also featured a cast of wait staff bearing baskets
“I remember one time, the CBC asked me what
everyone go out for fish.”
of cheese and garlic bread and tiny tubs of sour
I’m doing about it, and I said, ‘Well, I’m doing
Of course, barometer readings can’t stay
cream, bacon bits and chives to garnish the
nothing about it because the suppliers supplied
high and what goes up must come down. Over
football-sized stuffed potatoes.
me beef since the day we opened. I trust them
its four decades in business, Caesar’s held
On the first night they were open, the heat
and, if it goes through them, then that means
fast through four recessions, the great bust of
from the broiler set off the sprinkler system,
there is no panic,’” Giannoulis says.
the 1980s and three booms. During the first
an unwelcome deluge christening the kitchen,
Through bust, boom and beef, the Caesar’s
though nothing so serious as to dampen the staff ’s recession, Giannoulis recalls, contemporaries
restaurants would indeed survive to broil anwere offering two-for-one meal discounts and
spirits. Giannoulis recalls there were around 40
other day.
other incentives, believing increased liquor
to 50 customers in the house. “If that happened
And broil they did. That’s really all they’ve
sales would make up the difference. Caesar’s,
today,” he muses, “it would be a disaster.”
ever needed to do. One criticism of Caesar’s —
however, grit its teeth and decided not to get on that over 40 years in business it’s done little to
Word of mouth about the new steakhouse
that train, believing that slashing prices was not evolve — is also its highest praise. To be fair,
spread and, within six months, the place was
something that could be done without slashing
packed to the gills with oilmen and bankers,
it’s not like things haven’t changed at all since
standards as well.
closing deals over garrulous martini lunches
the downtown location opened 40 years back,
“We said, ‘We’ll hang on, doing what we’re
and dinners fuelled with bottles of red wine (not
although the last renovations took place 30 years
doing, keep on doing a good job and selling
thinking twice about driving home afterwards).
ago, in 1981 and 1982.
Word of mouth about the new
steakhouse spread and, within six
months, the place was packed
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From left to right
Louis Eliopoulos,
Ken Fletcher,
Danny Zein.
Not that lack of
change is necessarily a
bad thing. “That’s kind
of the way everyone
likes it, the fact that it
hasn’t changed,” says
longtime local food
critic and Avenue
contributor John
Gilchrist. “Not everything has to change
every couple years.
I recently visited a
restaurant that opened
five years ago. It looks
dated. This is what
happens when you try
to be so much of the
moment, then what
happens when that
moment passes?
“A place like Caesar’s, it just always has been
what it is. If you have a problem with that, too
bad. The guys have got it down. They know what
they’re doing.”
What they’re doing in that former 4th Avenue
print shop is creating the kind of Western Canadian experience visitors come seeking, putting
forth the type of steakhouse that tourists put on
their “when in Calgary” checklists.
The celebrities who have sat in Caesar’s dining
room are often in town filming Western-genre
films. Brad Pitt ate there during the shoot for The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert
Ford, as did Morgan Freeman during the filming
of Unforgiven. Tom Selleck and his ’stache have
graced the premises. Robert Duvall is a repeat
visitor. Even comic Don Rickles held court once,
proving to be as much of a cut-up in real life as he
is on the screen.
Sports celebs tend to like the cut of Caesar’s jib
as well: retired NHL coach Scotty Bowman has a
designated table, just in front of the broiler. According to Kaketsis, Bowman was known to prefer mealtime solitude, choosing to sit alone, even
when the rest of whatever team he happened to
be helming at the time was also dining that night.
Multiple Stanley Cup-winner Glenn Anderson
still comes by when he’s in town.
Seminal boy band New Kids On The Block
were almost turned away by Kaketsis at the height
of their fame, on account of their precisely ripped
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“A place like Caesar’s, it just
always has been what it is. If you
have a problem with that, too bad. The
guys have got it down. They know what
they’re doing.”— John Gilchrist
denim attire (the 1970s jacket-required dress code
wasn’t in effect at that point, but even so…).
Politicians have shown up in droves: local
talent like Stephen Harper, Ed Stelmach, Ralph
Klein and Joe Clark; out-of-towners like Paul
Martin and John Turner (according to Kaketsis, “a very funny guy”). Former U.S. President
George H.W. Bush even came to Caesar’s. Pierre
Trudeau did not.
While it’s a kind of parlour-game fun for
Caesar’s visitors to consider what celebrity butt
might have sat on the red-leather upholstery of
the solid, but well-used dining room chairs, it’s
most likely that chair held a repeat customer, another pillar of the restaurant’s impressive longevity. It might be one of the old guard who furrows
their brow at how far down standards of dress
have gone, or it might be one of the deceptively
down-dressed, energy-sector big shots who
continues to consider the place the city’s second
Petroleum Club (bankers and lawyers wear suits,
says Kaketsis; oilmen don’t). Or it might be one
of the young turks of Stephen Avenue looking to
tap into a scene with roots deeper than margarita Monday at the 3rd Street Earl’s.
In a city where four decades might as well
be four centuries, Caesar’s is undeniably
old-school. Now in their 70s, the remain-
ing owners (Tsaprailis passed away in 1999,
Girgulis in 2001) are no spring chickens, either.
Giannoulis says he comes in less and less these
days, just to visit his former kitchen domain and
to hang out with the dwindling crew of longtime
regulars (no parking, he grumbles), and Kaketsis
is relaxing his grip on the front of house, finger
by finger, allowing son George to drive the Caesar’s empire into the next four decades. While
the intention is to give the Willow Park location
a bit of a facelift, there are no plans to alter the
original Caesar’s, just a desire to keep things as
the customers like them.
It makes sense. The steak dinners served up
at the downtown Caesar’s are as big a part of the
Calgary mystique as the ranching culture. If you
ask both Kaketsis and Giannoulis to name a favourite night in the past four decades, neither one
will say it involved any particular celebrity or bigname politician. Rather, it’s just those nondescript
evenings when the vibe is lively and the house is
full, and there’s a residual sense of awe that four
kids from the mountains of Greece could end up
here and create something so profound.
That’s because a steak dinner can be more
than just a meal; it can turn into a ritual of
sorts, best performed not by a restaurant, but
by an institution.